I began this analysis because footy seemed to have lost its mojo over the years. Perhaps I was watching too much of it, or that my team, the Demons, were uncompetitive for almost a decade, or that the competition was really, truly getting stale.

We get bombarded with lots of player stats and information on the minutiae within play, but little attention is paid at the macro level, to the history and current health of the competition.

The scores for all matches going back to the formal start of the AFL/VFL in 1897 was readily available thanks to afltables.com. And the data has proven to be quite useful in order to test some hypotheses about the general state of the game.

And if you couldn't be bothered reading the article, it certainly was the case that footy was in a lull, coinciding with the addition of Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney. I think the addition of these two team had a broader impact than we typically recognise. While the AFL has historically been quite the balanced provider to clubs, these teams were given priority to soak up the best talent, leaving a bare cupboard for clubs that were at the bottom end of their cycle in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Let alone demand for second teams in non-AFL states, there simply was not enough talent to go around in this period of expansion.

Luckily, this period seems to have ended in 2017 and we are back to the somewhat socialist paradise that is the AFL.

Go Dees!

- Michael

Feel free to get in touch: michael@thisdatatalks.com